Set in Stone, Chapter 18.
The study was considerably smaller than it had appeared when she had been in it uninvited. The casebook was open on the desk between them, but he was not looking at it. He was looking at her, in the cautious way he had adopted since he had found her in the dispensary holding a full glass of rutinum compositum with the careful attention of someone solving a problem.
“The classical sources,” Darcy said now, “describe the blood of Medusa as having two distinct properties, depending on which side of the body it is taken from. The left side kills. The right side heals, or gives life. Medusa’s blood spilling upon the sea at her death is supposed to have spawned the Pegasus.”
Elizabeth waited. He was choosing his words with the care of a man who had been thinking about this for some time and had not yet determined the correct order in which to present them.
“It is not,” he continued, “a property I have been able to confirm in any useful sense. Georgiana—” He stopped. Adjusted the corner of the casebook with one finger. “I did not take blood from Georgiana. By the time it might have been possible to do so safely, it was no longer necessary.”
By which he meant: by the time Georgiana was dead. Elizabeth did not say so. She thought he probably knew she understood him.
“But the accounts are consistent across sufficient sources that I am inclined to believe there is something in it. And if the healing property exists—if it has ever existed—then it follows that it might do rather more than close wounds.” He looked at her directly, briefly, then away again. “I think it might reverse petrification.”
Elizabeth found she had gone very still. “You think.”
“I have not tested it. I have no method of testing it without—” He gestured toward her, a truncated motion that might have been apology or simple statement of fact. “Without you.”
“And if it does reverse petrification,” she said carefully, “then what?”
“Then it is possible—” He hesitated over the word, which she thought was as close as he would come to admitting uncertainty. “It is possible that the same property, applied not to stone but to the condition itself, might cure it. The blood combined with the Rutinum compositum in the correct proportions. I believe the compound has been suppressing the manifestation without addressing the underlying mechanism. The blood might address the mechanism.”
She looked at him for a moment. He did not look away this time, though she thought it cost him something.
“You have a hypothesis,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Based on Ovid.”
“And Apollodorus. And the earlier fragments, insofar as they survive.” He said this without apparent irony. “The mechanisms described are surprisingly consistent, when you account for narrative embellishment.”
“My father will be delighted to hear you have been doing classical scholarship.”
“Your father,” Darcy said, with a faint edge of something that might have been amusement under other circumstances, “identified my compound as moly before I could bring myself to admit it. I am not inclined to dismiss his sources.”
She supposed that was fair. She found she was turning the thing over in her mind, studying it from several angles, the way one might study a tool to see whether it would serve. The blood heals. The blood might depetrify. The blood combined with the compound might cure. It was a series of conditional statements, each depending on the one before it, and none of them tested.
“But you need the blood,” she said.
“Yes.”
“From me.”
“Yes.”
“In—” She stopped. Found the edge of the desk with her hand and held it, briefly, while she finished the thought. “In the other form.”
He did not correct her terminology. He simply said, “Yes.”
She had known that, of course. Had understood it as soon as he said blood. One did not harvest blood from the mythical Medusa while she was drinking tea in a sitting room looking perfectly ordinary. One harvested it from the woman with snakes for hair whose gaze turned men to stone, and the difficulty inherent in that process was probably why he had not proposed it before now.
“And how,” she said, keeping her voice level, “do you propose to do that without being petrified?”
He had been waiting for the question. She could see it in the way he answered, too quickly, as though he had been holding the words ready.
“Mirrors,” he said. “The camera apparatus. I can observe you safely in reflection. If I can position the equipment correctly, I should be able to collect a sample without direct exposure.”
She looked at him. “You should be able to.”
“I believe I can.”
“You believe.”
“I have not tested it,” he said again, and this time there was something under the words that sounded almost like frustration. “I cannot test it. Not without—”
“Without me,” she finished. “Yes. I am aware.”
There was a silence. She found herself thinking about the brown bottle in the dispensary, the weight of it in her hand, the way the solution had presented itself with such clarity once she had understood the problem. The episodes would stop if she were not there to have them. It had been a simple piece of reasoning, and Darcy had interrupted it, and she had been angry with him for approximately four seconds before she realized he had been correct to do so.
This was the solution he had been carrying instead. This was what he had been working toward since Georgiana, or possibly before. The blood of Medusa, applied correctly. The compound refined to perform its intended function rather than simply suppressing the symptoms. A cure, not a cessation.
She realized, with a small shock of recognition, that she wanted it.
Not simply to stop being dangerous, though that would be enough. But to know what she was and to be able to hold it, to use it, to have participated in her own remedy rather than simply submitting to someone else’s management of her condition. She had been a patient long enough. She found she had no particular desire to continue in that role.
“If it works,” she said, “you could cure my sisters, if they…manifested.”
He blinked at her. She thought the issue had been in his mind but he had not been expecting her to raise it first.
“Possibly,” he said, after a moment. “If one of them is a carrier. There are—” He stopped himself. “Yes. Possibly.”
“Then we should do it.”
“Elizabeth—”
She looked at him directly. He held the gaze for three seconds, then looked away. She found she had learned to count the interval before he did that.
“You thought I was going to kill myself,” she said.
He went very still.
“I was not,” she continued, in the same level tone. “I was solving a problem. I was solving it badly, with incomplete information and the wrong tool, but I was solving it. You have just handed me a better tool and better information. If you think I am not going to use it, you have mistaken me.”
“The risk—”
“Is mine to take,” she said. “You have spent the last several minutes explaining that you need my blood and my cooperation. I am offering both. Unless you have changed your mind about the hypothesis.”
“I have not changed my mind.”
“Then we are in agreement.”
He looked at her again. She thought he was trying to determine whether she meant it, or whether she was still in the place he had found her an hour ago, holding the bottle with the careful attention of someone who had reasoned herself into a dangerous corner. She waited. Let him look.
“I think,” he said finally, “that you are considerably braver than is entirely convenient.”
She felt her mouth twitch. “I shall try to be more cowardly in future.”
“Please do not.”
It came out more quietly than she thought he had intended. He had found her with the rue compound. He had not asked her what she had been thinking. He had simply redirected her toward a different answer, and the fact that he had been carrying that answer ready suggested he had been thinking about it for some time. Possibly since Georgiana. Possibly since he had opened the casebook and written Medusin at the top of the first page, then crossed it out later and written Rutinum compositum instead.
She found she wanted to ask him when he had changed the name, and why, and whether it had anything to do with the photographs he had just moved into the drawer. She found, on further reflection, that she knew the answer to at least one of those questions already, and that asking it aloud would require them both to acknowledge more than was strictly necessary at present.
“We will need to plan it carefully,” Darcy said, pulling the casebook toward him. His hands were steady. “The timing. The apparatus. I will need to prepare the compound in advance so that the blood can be integrated immediately. And you will need to—” He stopped.
“Transform,” she supplied.
“Yes.”
She thought about the tripwire photographs, the ones she had found in this room when she had come here uninvited. She had been a woman with snakes for hair making eye contact with the camera, and she had not been present for any of it, and the thought of doing it deliberately, with Darcy watching in a mirror in reach in case something went wrong, was considerably more alarming than she cared to admit.
But she had already decided. She had decided when he told her the blood might cure her, might cure Lydia, might restore her mother and Mary and Kitty to something other than stone. She had decided when he said he needed her cooperation, because cooperation meant she was not simply a patient anymore.
“Tell me what you need me to do,” she said.
He told her.